Vivien Kellems Announces Her Tax Resistance

As I mentioned a while back, I’m putting together a “tax resistance reader”
with historical examples of writing by and about tax resistance in its various
forms.

I wanted to include at least one example from the American “Constitutionalist”
tax protester movement. Although it is a different sort of egg than the
conscientious or tactical tax resistance examples that are the main focus of
the reader, it is a surprisingly large and influential movement, and one that
occasionally mixes with the contemporary American war tax resistance movement.

The Constitutionalist tax protesters say that the federal government is
exceeding its Constitutional authority in the way it taxes Americans,
particularly in the case of the income tax — that there is no law, or no
Constitutional law, or no valid law, or something of that sort, that requires
us to pay a tax on our incomes. They typically hope that the federal court
system will see things their way (though the courts rarely if ever do) but, at
the same time, are so convinced by their understanding of the Constitutional
limits on government that court cases to the contrary usually neither convince
nor deter them.

It’s a charming faith in a sort of Platonic Constitution as it ought-to-be
(or, often, a fantasy nostalgia for the Constitution of an imaginary past). At
its best, it asserts a citizen’s prerogative to the superior share of
responsibility for running the republic and restraining its government that is
a frequent theme in democratic political theory. But at its worst, it’s a
bunch of bizarre mumbo-jumbo and cargo cult legal blather.

Most of the contemporary tax protester literature is devoted to an intricate
analysis of a legal framework that exists nowhere on Earth, but only in an
imaginary world. It’s a bit like watching people play role-playing games in
which they become space captains or World War Ⅱ generals or sword-wielding
elves, only in this game they become lawyers.

Baroque and fascinating as these arguments can sometimes be, they’re also
pretty dumb — and quickly anachronistic, as new “can’t miss” Constitutional
or “common law” arguments are advanced by a new generation of tax protesters,
to replace the ones that failed for the last set. Each new generation of
arguments requires a deeper dive into the arcana of obscure court opinions,
old lawbooks, and bizarre logical constructions.

I hoped to find an example of the genre that was more straightforward and
sparing on the mumbo-jumbo. For this, I went back to
Vivien Kellems, a
fascinating woman and one whose tax resistance in defense of her version of
the Platonic Constitution serves as an exemplar of the American
Constitutionalist tax protester phenomenon.

The trick was to find some of her writing and get permission to include it in
my reader.

Kellems wrote about her tax resistance in a book called
Toil, Taxes and Trouble, that was published by E.P.
Dutton in 1952. E.P. Dutton was later absorbed by
the Penguin Group. Their permissions department says that the rights to the
book reverted to the author, who was represented by Curtis Brown
Ltd. However, a representative
of Curtis Brown told me they don’t represent Kellems’s work any longer, and
didn’t have any leads for me.

My understanding is that a book that was published in
1952 went into the public domain if its copyright
registration wasn’t renewed by the end of
1980. So my next step was to try to find out if the registration was
renewed, and if so, by whom. I checked the on-line database at the
U.S. Copyright
Catalog (which covers copyrights registered after
1978), and I even checked through the full,
pre-1978 database (which is huge, hard to track down, and only recently
available to the public). There’s no sign of Kellems’s book in either
database. So, I’m going to go on the assumption that Toil,
Taxes and Trouble is now free-for-all.

And, in that spirit, and from that book, here’s a transcript of the speech
Kellems gave to the Los Angeles Rotary Club on 13
February, 1948, to announce that she was going to stop withholding
taxes from the paychecks of her employees:

It has frequently been said that history repeats itself, and today, we are
witnessing a repetition of the act of Caesar Augustus two thousand years
ago. It all began in 1913, when we issued a
decree “that all the world should be taxed,” every man in his own city. For
in that year we adopted the Sixteenth Amendment to our Constitution:

“The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes on income from
whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and
without regard to any census or enumeration.”

And when we adopted this income tax amendment, we departed from our
constitutional method of taxation.

For one hundred and twenty-five years, the
Federal Government had levied taxes and they were always apportioned among
the several States. Why do you suppose the Constitution is so specific and so
explicit that
Federal
taxes shall be uniform and apportioned among the States? For one reason
only. Our forefathers were determined to build a republic, with equal
opportunity and equal responsibility for each and every one of us. They knew
that the power to tax is the
power to destroy, and they did not wish to have one group of citizens,
or one part of the country penalized for the unfair advantage of another.

How wise and farsighted they were! For one hundred
and twenty-five years this was our traditional, constitutional system
of taxation, and under it we built the richest, most powerful nation in the
world. We developed and maintained for the majority of our people, a standard
of living, undreamed of in any other country, the hope and envy of all the
world.

And then what happened? We chucked our proved system of taxation out the
window, and we passed the income tax. Gone was our uniformity, gone was our
apportionment among the States. And with uniformity and apportionment went a
great deal more — our fundamental American rights.
At first, we started with a tiny little one per cent
on all incomes. That being more or less painless, we raised it to 2 per cent.
And then 5 per cent, and then 10 per cent, and then 20 per cent, and then 50
per cent, and up and up and up to 90 per cent and in
1943, due to that clever so-called 75 per cent
forgiveness trick, some citizens in this country were taxed more than 100 per
cent of their incomes. Is it a tax or is it confiscation?

But that isn’t all. Being so intrigued with the income tax, we decided that
if one tax is good, two are better and we proceeded to pass the capital gains
tax which slapped business right in the face and sent it reeling into the
corner. And to salt it down, we added the idiotic capital stock tax. And
still not satisfied, we made sure that every dividend should pay two taxes — one by the corporation and another by the stockholder, if and when he got it.
And right in the middle of this tax orgy, we elected an Administration that
made a wonderful discovery: The world was its little oyster to open.

Up to this point we thought we had done pretty well, but we soon realized we
were just pikers. Taxes? We didn’t know the meaning of the word, but we soon
found out that the New Dealers did. Taxes? A new one every day or two! They
rained upon us as the gentle dew from Heaven. “Tax and tax, spend and spend,
elect and elect,” quoth the delighted
Harry Hopkins. Soak
the rich in Illinois, or New York, or Connecticut and buy some votes in
Oregon or Nevada or wherever they are needed. The formula worked like magic
for political purposes but it threw our country into the deepest and most
tragic depression of our history. The depression of
the 1930’s was a tax depression.
Business simply could not function. It took a world-wide war, billions of
dollars, and the precious lives of thousands of our boys to pull us out of it.

But with the adoption of the income tax, we lost something more precious than
uniformity and apportionment among the States. Let us go back to our
Fourth and Fifth
Amendments: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses,
papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be
violated…” and “…no person shall be compelled to be a witness against
himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of
law.”

These two Amendments insured to the citizens of the United States the
right of
privacy. It was ours in every sense, until the passage of the
Sixteenth Amendment, but with the income tax, we lost this precious right. If
I say, “No,” you cannot come into my house without a search warrant, and
before you can secure such a warrant, you must advance good and sufficient
cause for searching my house. But the Income Tax Inspector can come into my
home or yours. In the name of the Income Tax, the Federal Government can
search and seize every paper you own, it can force you into court, to be a
witness against yourself, and if you are not able to pay the tax, it can sell
you out, lock, stock and barrel. The Income Tax is the strongest weapon ever
placed in the hands of an unscrupulous government, and as long as that
Amendment is a part of our Constitution, our freedom is in jeopardy. Our
right to privacy, so carefully insured to us by the Fourth and Fifth
Amendments, has vanished.

But taxes are like strong drink. They grow upon you. If income taxes are good
for some of us, they must be good for all of us. If one citizen is to pay an
income tax then every person who has an income should also pay his
proportionate share. With which conclusion I agree. But I disagree with the
premise — I don’t think an income tax is good for anyone, the taxpayer or the
Government.

But this time we really did a job. Under the hypnosis of war hysteria, with a
pusillanimous Congress rubber-stamping every whim of the White House, we
passed the withholding tax. We appointed ourselves so many policemen and with
this club in our hands, we set out to collect a tax from every hapless
individual who received wages from us. We became our
“brother’s keeper.”

From time immemorial the tax collector has been feared and hated. The baron
of old used to farm out his tax collections, paying his agent a percentage of
what he was able to wrest from his impoverished subjects. It is not
accidental that this job was placed upon the employer. A crafty
Administration which thrived upon class hatred “planned it that way.” Here
was another wedge to drive between the employer and the employee, another
opportunity to cause misunderstanding and dissension. The employee did not
blame his government, he blamed his employer, and even today thousands of
workers in this country still think it is a dirty trick of the wicked
capitalists.

The most un-American phrase in our modern vocabulary is “take home pay.” What
do we mean, “take home pay”? When I hire a man to work for me we discuss
three things: the job to be done, the hours he shall work, and the wages he
shall receive. And on Friday when he received that pay envelope, we have both
fulfilled our contract for that week. There is no further obligation on
either side. The money in that envelope belongs to him. He has worked for it
and he has earned it. No one, not even the United States Government, has the
right to touch it. Who dares to lay profane hands upon that money, to rudely
filch from that free man the fruits of his labor, even before the money is in
his own hands. This is a monstrous invasion of the rights of a free people
and an outrageous perversion of the spirit of the Constitution. This is the
miserable system foisted upon the people of our country by
New Deal zealots and
arrogant Communists who have wormed themselves into high places in
Washington. This system is deliberately designed to make involuntary tax
collectors of every employer and to impose involuntary tax servitude upon
every employee. We don’t need to go to Russia for slavery, we’ve got it right
here.

The employer or professional man, not on a salary, is allowed a bit of time
in which to prepare his accounting and pay his tax. But from the salaried
worker or wage earner that pay envelope is rudely snatched from the
paymaster’s hand and those taxes taken in advance out of today’s butter or
tomorrow’s hospital bill. This withholding law has made a greedy, avaricious
monster out of the Federal Tax Grabber and an unwilling
Simon
Legree out of the wretched employer forced to do his dirty work for him.

Many otherwise patriotic citizens have lent themselves to this system because
they mistakenly believed that it would create greater tax consciousness and a
sentiment for economy in our Federal expenditures. Even if this were true,
the system is still wrong. Shall we compromise our fundamental American
principles for expediency? The majority of workers today figure their wages
by the money in that pay envelope. And so they should. That 20 per cent is
disregarded completely — it has been shifted to the shoulders of the
employers and is nothing more or less than a 20 per cent payroll tax which is
added to the price of every manufactured article. Labor doesn’t need a raise.
All labor needs is to get what labor earns. Lop off that 20 per cent payroll
tax, labor will have its raise, and the inflationary spiral will take a sharp
dip down. It’s as simple as that.

And how about the millions of dollars spent by employers each year in
collecting that tax? If it costs my little company as much as it does to
deduct, withhold and pay that tax, what must it cost a big company such as
General Motors? Why should we bear this additional expense? The Government
gets the tax, doesn’t it? Well then, how about the Government paying for
collecting it? I have searched the Constitution through and can find no power
or right granted to the Federal Government for this mass picking of the
pockets of the American people.

The very men who shout the loudest against the demands of the Union for
the checkoff
have connived and conspired with the New Dealers for this vast Government
Checkoff.

Just how far are we going? Are we going to deduct contributions for the
church, dues for the lodge, money for the grocery bill, the electric light
and coal bill? Shall we buy clothes for the children and pay tuition for
their schooling? Once having started, where do we stop? If this is Russia,
then let’s say so. Let’s just hand the worker an envelope full of coupons at
the end of each week and call it a day!

Paying taxes is a duty, a responsibility and a privilege of citizenship.
Without taxes we can have no government. However I do not exercise other
duties, responsibilities and privileges of citizenship for my employees. I do
not vote for them, I do not form political opinions for them, I do not select
a church for them, I do not pay real estate taxes for them. They are all free
American citizens, thoroughly capable of performing all of the duties and
responsibilities of citizenship for themselves. And so, from this day, I am
not collecting nor paying their income taxes for them.

It is about four o’clock in
Westport. By this time our payroll has been distributed. The income tax of
each individual has been distributed. The income tax of each individual has
been deducted and withheld, but it is the last time the Kellems Company will
perform this service for the Government. I have more confidence in my
employees than has their Government. I believe that every person in my employ
will pay his taxes as long as we have an income tax law, but if he does not,
that is a matter between himself and his Government, exactly as his religion
is a matter between himself and his God. I have no right to inject myself
into either relationship.

If High Tax Harry
wants me to get that money for him, then he must appoint me an agent for the
Internal Revenue Department, he must pay me a salary for my work, and he must
reimburse me for my expenses incurred in collecting that tax. And I want a
badge, too. I am not a tax collector and if an American citizen can be fined
and thrown into prison for not collecting taxes from his workers, then let’s
know about it now. Let’s see what the court has to say about this law — it’s
not the first one passed in violation of the Constitution.

The decision to take this step has not been made hastily nor has it been an
easy one. There are many sincere people who will censure me for breaking the
law. Knowing this and having been through one New Deal smear and persecution,
I still break this law, deliberately. Before I reach Westport the income tax
inspector will be ensconced in my office, completely surrounded by my private
papers, my company books and my canceled checks. He will greet me at the
door, righteous indignation all over his face. Well, having gone through it
before, I can go through it again. Because you see I made a discovery. Like
all bullies and bloodsucking parasites, those mangy little bureaucrats down
in Washington are at heart yellow cowards. So no matter what they do I’m
standing on my rights until the court hands down its verdict.

As in the life of each individual there occasionally comes a moment of grave
decision, so in the life of a free nation comes a significant moment, fraught
with fearful consequences. We have reached such a moment in our development.
Free people preserve their freedom and rid themselves of tyranny only be
resistance and by breaking the law. We have a country because our forefathers
defied a tyrant and broke the law. They broke tax laws. Rather than pay a
tax they threw the tea into the harbor. They refused to pay a stamp tax. They
poured their whisky down the drain rather than pay a tax on it. An American
is aroused indeed, when he will sacrifice his liquor! Every man who signed
the Declaration of Independence was a lawbreaker and a rebel. He broke the
law, but he founded a nation. Thousands of patriotic American men and women
spirited Negro slaves across the Canadian border. They broke the law but they
freed a race. Thoreau, one of our most revered and honored philosophers,
refused to pay a tax and went to prison. He broke the law but he saved his
honor, and while in prison, he wrote that immortal document
“Civil Disobedience.” It was the reading
of “Civil Disobedience” which determined the whole course of Gandhi’s life.
Brave American women suffered humiliation and imprisonment when they dared to
defy the Government. They broke the law but they won the vote and freedom for
their sex.

One night in the spring of 1947, a group
of courageous women, about one hundred of them, gathered in my shop in
Westport and at ten o’clock went to work. We were free American citizens
prohibited by law from working after ten o’clock at night and before six in
the morning. We broke the law but we gave back to the women of Connecticut
their constitutional right to work when they please.

Did you ever break the prohibition law? Ever make any bathtub gin? Ever get
a ticket for speeding? What is the difference between breaking the speed law
and breaking the income tax law? A lot. For one you get slapped on the wrist
with a small fine; for the other you get slapped in the jug with a big fine.
The penalties should be reversed. Speeding may mean loss of life but cheating
on the income tax means only loss of money. However, the New Deal has always
valued American money more than American lives although it has spent both
with impunity.

Unjust and tyrannical laws always breed contempt and evasion. Just as
millions of Americans made, and sold, and drank liquor under Prohibition, so
today millions of Americans are lying, and cheating, and evading the income
tax. It is no more possible to enforce the income tax law than it was to
enforce the prohibition law. We couldn’t plug those liquor leaks and we can’t
plug these tax leaks. We are losing billions of dollars in unpaid taxes and
the basis of business is rapidly shifting from credit to cash. Everything
from apartment houses to fur coats is being sold for cash. We have become a
nation of tax collectors, tax evaders and craven cowards. So, he who is
without sin, let him cast the first stone.

Our forefathers bequeathed to us a heritage of freedom. Implicit in that
bequest was the obligation and the responsibility to pass that freedom on to
our posterity, unimpaired. What greater indictment can be made of our
generation than that we have permitted that freedom to slip between our
fingers; we have allowed despots and tyrants to tax it away from us. We
cannot pass it on, in the American tradition, to our children who have every
right to receive that freedom, so carefully guarded for us by our ancestors.
We have failed in that sacred trust.

The whole country is confused and discouraged, no longer is there incentive
and ambition to work, to achieve success, and to set aside savings for the
future. Bombarded by ceaseless propaganda, robbed of his just earnings, the
average American is like the worm ready to turn. All over this land there is
one burning topic of conversation — taxes. A ground swell of seething
resentment is growing into a tidal wave that may well engulf the tax
planners, the tax grabbers and all their kind. Americans will bear a lot and
are slow to anger but as this treasonable plot to sell us out unfolds before
their eyes, they realize that this is not the ordinary corruption,
mismanagement and bad government we have known in other periods of our
history. This is something far more sinister. The destruction of the
capitalistic system by increasingly heavy income taxes is the purest Marxian
doctrine, and Lenin followed his great teacher, when in
1924, he declared that the United States would
spend itself into destruction. We are becoming aware that these ruinous taxes
are not accidental, they are not even a result of the war; they have been
deliberately saddled upon our backs as a part of a plot of the Communists to
take us over. Bankruptcy and national suicide stare us in the face.

How much longer are we going to take it? Is there no more good, old-fashioned
American courage, or have we become a nation of spineless jellyfish? Are we
worthy of the sacrifices of our forefathers or are we the silly suckers the
rest of the world thinks us? There is no time to lose. We must strike now.
We are the Government. We, the people, are still the strongest thing
in our country and we can still get what we want. We just have to want it
hard enough. We have fought and won a global war to free the whole world and
have succeeded only in bringing chaos and misery to that world and in making
tax slaves of ourselves.

So let’s repeal the income tax. You think it can’t be done? If we left it to
you men, it couldn’t. But I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. We women are
going to repeal it. We got you out of that prohibition mess, didn’t we? Well,
we’ll dig you out of this one. But I want to remind you that we didn’t vote
for either one — they were both exclusively your ideas. So we’ll get you out
once more but for goodness’ sake, the next time you get such a brain wave,
will you please tell us so we can stop you in time!

You see we women have more to lose in this situation than you men, we own
most of the assets of the country. Approximately 70 or 80 per cent of the
wealth of the United States is in our little, lily-white hands, and if you
dear, sweet men don’t start taking care of yourselves, we’ll soon own it all.
You work yourselves to the bone and along about forty or fifty, you pop off
with heart disease. And not content with that, ever so often you have a war
and stand up and shoot each other. Just keep this up and it won’t be long
until we own and run the whole country. And I’ll give you three guesses as to
how many income taxes we’ll have.

Because we women are just about fed up with all this nonsense, so-called
socialized medicine, federal aid to education and all the rest of his
paternalistic claptrap, designed to make us incompetent dependents upon the
Government. All we want is for the Government to give back to the American
people the money which is rightfully theirs, the money for which they work
and which they earn, and we’ll pay our own doctors’ bills, we’ll educate our
own children, and we’ll once more become self-respecting, self-reliant
citizens. And, incidentally, we’ll stop spending half our time filling out
ten thousand silly income tax returns, questionnaires and forms which will
give us more time in which to make more money — for ourselves. Of
course, this will automatically get rid of thousands of form makers, form
readers, form filers and tax collectors but we’re not going to shed any tears
about them. They can go out into private life and get productive jobs like
the rest of us. With them off our backs we’ll save thousands of dollars and
give ourselves another tax reduction.

We women are simple people. We can’t understand why the Government shouldn’t
first determine its income and then live within it. Why does it pass the
budget first and then run out and see where it’s going to get the money?
Right now the Senate won’t act on the tax bill until it sees what the budget
is going to be. We believe that instead of passing Mr. Truman’s supercolossal
budget the Senate should first give us a whopping, big tax cut, right across
the board, and then tell Mr. Truman how much money he can spend. That’s what
we do. We first find out how much money we’re going to have and then we
decide what we’ll spend and if that income doesn’t mean fur coats and diamond
rings, well then we just don’t have fur coats and diamond rings. And we think
it’s time the Federal Government cut out fur coats and diamond rings for a
spell, and concentrated upon meat and potatoes.

And so may I be very impolite and close this little talk with a few words,
not to you, but to another audience, a vast, unseen audience, many not within
sound of my voice. I’m speaking to women, millions of American women; to
every woman whose husband comes home at the end of the week with 20 per cent
of his wages taken out of his pay envelope, to every woman worried and
harassed over the mounting grocery bill, to every mother wondering how to buy
a little boy a new pair of shoes, to every mother frantic with fear over a
sick child, unable to pay a competent doctor. Women, women of America, let us
band together! Let us rise up and say we will take no more of it. Let us
write, let us wire, let us telephone our Congressmen, let us march on
Washington, if necessary, but let us demand that this monstrous, wholesale
robbery of the American people come to an end!

Determining copyright expiration is a strange art, and the
convoluted
law that governs it is every bit as baroque as modern Constitutionalist tax
protester legal theory. So, I may be jumping the gun here. If you, dear
reader, hold the rights to Vivien Kellems’s writings, please do let me know,
so I can ask for permission to include it in my reader, and forgiveness for
including it here.

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